Category Archives: Advances in Medicine

I thought, that ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) was outlawed, because of the cruelty of the nature of the treatment, apparently, they’d found use for it again, from the Front Page Sections, translated…

“Alzheimer’s disease is NOT only a matter of health, it’s also a problem of the society, economics, and human”. The M.I.T.’s Learning and Memory Graduate Department Professor and Founder, and the person who was a member of the Central Research Center, Li-Huei Tsai stated yesterday, on the 31st “Neuroscience Conference”, she’d shared the outcomes of the researches on Alzheimer’s Disease.

Tsai stated, that every four seconds, a person on this planet will get diagnosed with dementia, and it’s already become a trend in Asia, and, seventy to eighty percent of dementia is caused by Alzheimer’s. And, Alzheimer’s is the collective name of variety of symptoms, and because of how different the symptoms are, there is NOT yet a way of treating it effectively.

Tsai had been involved, long-term with Alzheimer’s Disease research and her and her team found that the “HDAC suppressant” can help find back the lost memories, and there are now, pharmaceutical companies that are funding to the research. But she said, that the medication’s side effects can include the suppression of the functions of bone marrows, for instance, the white blood count, the red blood count, along with platelet count would be lowered, the lab is still currently, searching for a better medication, with less of the undesired side effects.

Other than trying to find new medications to treat the symptoms of Alzheimer’s, electroconvulsive therapy, hopefully, can be a new way for treatment. Tsai said that recent studies showed, that in the mice that’s lost memories they’d given the hippocampus a minute’s worth of electric shocks, and it had successfully help bring the mice’s memories back, but, how to find the area in the hippocampus in humans is still a mystery, but, this electroconvulsive therapy that could lessen the side effects of the oral medications had gotten the scientists “very excited.”

Tsai pointed out, that Europe and America had spent a LOT of resources on researches of dementia, but, there’s still too little resources being put into the researches of neuroscience, must less compared to cancer or other infectious diseases.

And so, IF this works, this could BE a huge break through, but, you have to consider the humane aspect of this: who the HELL would agree to getting her/his brains cut open, and have electrodes attached to the surfaces of her/his brains? And, even IF this works, it is still at the very beginning stages of researches, and, just like how long it takes a drug to get approved by the FDA, this will take a very LONG time to get approved too, but this offers a small amount of hope.